The following abbreviations are utilized herein:    AP atomic process    BP business process    DAG directed acyclic graph    IT information technology    QOS quality of service    SBP stochastic business process    SLA service level agreement    SyBP synchronized business process    SySBP synchronized stochastic business process
Outsourcing of information technology (IT) services emerged as a way for non-IT organizations to increase efficiency, increase capacity and mitigate risks associated with supporting an IT environment. Many businesses utilize outsourced IT services to meet their business requirements. These business requirements may be static or dynamic. IT service providers generally face an increasingly competitive landscape in addition to growing government and industry requirements. In pursuit of their goal of maximizing customer satisfaction, service providers generally seek to employ intelligent business solutions which provide deep analysis and orchestration of business processes and capabilities for optimizing the level of service and cost.
The global information society is an open service customer-driven market. User perspective influences functionality, design, and management of services. Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) best practices and ISO 20000 are representations of this new approach. Traditional technology-centric methodology for defining services is often being replaced by services defined by what they provide to the users.
As the structure of the IT outsourcing industry moves towards a global service-driven market, the role of service providers is undergoing noticeable change. Service providers are generally no longer willing to build and use services for a single customer or internal business unit but instead are looking to utilize single service management solutions using shared resources for a wide range of customers and services. The fact that resources may have different owners and users should be taken into account. Therefore, multi-customer issues may play a critical role in this environment.
There is increasing competition among service providers to offer new and customized services and provide customers with management functionality that enables customers to monitor, control and optimize these services. Thus, IT service providers generally strive to introduce more sophisticated and automated procedures into service management in order to meet customer demands and remain competitive.